A Proto-Future History

The first, although only the first, step towards retroactively recategorizing Poul Anderson's The Enemy Stars as the opening instalment of a future history series is taken in the opening sentence of the same author's subsequent short story, "The Ways of Love":

"Ten of their years before, we had seen that being come through the transporter into our ship and die." (p. 117)

First, ten Terrestrial years have elapsed. One decade does not a history make although it could have been a start. It is long enough for a second generation to have been born and to have become half grown.

Secondly, any substantial future history series should also present many different points of view. We should see an Emperor's-eye-view and a serf's-eye-view, or whatever the social gradations are in any particular civilization, and everything between. (E.E. Smith was called the "Historian of Civilizations" but that title rightfully belongs to Poul Anderson.) Anderson presents alternative perspectives on major conflicts in too many novels to list here, including several that constitute volumes of his History of Technic Civilization. This requirement for multiple viewpoints is brilliantly fulfilled, in the opening sentence of "The Ways of Love," when an alien narrator recalls his perception of a tragic event that we had previously been shown from a human perspective. Any futuristic narrative implies a longer history that its author lacks sufficient time to recount.